Red Death
by tao-fetish
Summary: Movie night turns into a political march down memory lane. References to the movie Private Benjamin.


**Title:** Red Death  
**Character(s) or Pairing(s):** Russia/America  
**Warnings:** Adult language, mention of a sexual relationship, and the majority of the fiction is a discussion of politics, which do not reflect the views of the author.  
**Summary:** Movie night turns into a political march down memory lane. References to the movie Private Benjamin.

**Author's Notes:** Hello, my name is Natalie, and I love the eighties—particularly eighties films. Private Benjamin is a favorite of mine, and I found it was on cable a while ago while channel surfing, so I kept it on for some familiar background noise while I worked. And it happened to be minutes before this scene. I remembered that Judy's boyfriend was a communist (a small latter detail by the way, in case anybody wants to see the movie because of this. I'd still recommend it, though), but being older and being into Hetalia put the way the army (over)reacted to the fact into a whole new perspective. It made me stop and think about it in terms of the times, and what things used to be like back in the eighties. How our relations are now with Russia, and the lingering psychological affects of the Cold War. I left out the part where another officer tells Judy it's either her boyfriend or the army, though I'm sure that may have struck a cord with Alfred as well, since he's not just having a slice of commie cake. He's having the whole bakery, so to speak.

And besides that scene there are like a million other themes that I wanted to include, lines of discussion that Alfred and Ivan could've had, but this story already feels unbelievably crammed—just like my brain. Finishing this story was kind of like pushing hard play-dough through a keyhole. But more than that I'm relieved to cross another prompt off my "to-write" Hetalia list.

Besides the movie and the conversation I saw resulting from it, I also included elements of a newspaper article I have about Russian-American relations. And, as I realized when I reread this, there are some similar themes to those in my multi-chapter fiction on hiatus. Not that I've even gotten that far yet in the updates, so it just has an eerie sense of foreboding. Which it's not supposed to do. Bad fiction, very bad.

A big thank you to Dominick for her help in editing.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Axis Powers Hetalia or Goldie Hawn.

* * *

At some point Alfred had deflated into sleep. He quite literally sank from an upright, solid position against the opposite side of the couch, to having his arms folded in a way that he could cradle his head without his glasses getting in the way.

Some people changed when they were lost in the comfortable blank world of sleep—Alfred was not one of them. He was just as annoying and invasive as he was when he was awake, pushing his feet against Ivan's thigh, threatening to cross its borders into his lap. Or one of them was, while the other insistently tried to dig underneath him. And if Alfred's big toe nudged him in the ass one more time…

Ivan smiled in deliberation, sliding his eyes up the line of Alfred's body to his profile, illuminated softly by the flickering glow of the television. With his features slack he looked so harmless and unsuspecting. Ivan could knock his feet off the couch, plant something in his Coke, or even wrap his hands around his neck. But all seemed to require the effort of moving. And something about being in Alfred's apartment filled him with indolence. Maybe it was something in the air, the water, or the fact that they've been watching TV for five hours straight.

Then he noticed the remote loosely guarded by the curve of Alfred's leg and belly, like a dragon coiled around a pile of treasure. He wondered if he touched it would Alfred growl at him. Would he even wake up?

He reached over slowly at first, into the space after Alfred's body just to see if he could brush his fingers against it without disturbing Alfred. His forearm brushed his thigh, but nothing happened: Alfred didn't even twitch. So Ivan grabbed the remote and dragged it onto his side of the couch.

It felt like a conquest, something valuable he took from Alfred because he did not protect it properly, which sent the cheapest of thrills through Ivan. He circled his thumb over the network of buttons, all numbers and initials and different shapes on the face of the control.

The program broke apart and rematerialized into an evangelist program, then a commercial for acne medication, and then a music video. Or that's what Ivan thought it was: it had music, and it was a video, but the flashing lights and erratically moving images made it impossible to watch.

His lids fluttered shut as his vision was stabbed to the back of his eyeballs, letting out a brief whine of protest before beating the remote blindly managed to get off the excruciating channel.

He landed on a movie in the grainy hues of twenty years ago, before the pictures on television became more vivid than real life. There was a man and a woman doing various things together: sitting at a café, walking down the street as a mannequin in a puffy pink cupcake of a blouse looked on, cuddling by the side of a river…

Finally Alfred stirred. It started in his feet; then shuddered up the rest of his body until his head lifted from the saddle of his arms. He glanced blearily at the television.

"This isn't my show."

"It isn't," Ivan agreed with delight.

Alfred pushed his glasses up to rub at his eyes. "Why are you watching a French movie?"

Ivan opened his mouth reflexively to respond, but stopped after he digested the anomaly in his question: _Alfred identified another country,_ spontaneously without help or a map with giant letters.

He tilted his head at him. "How did you know?"

"Accordions." With an almost inaudible grunt, Alfred pushed himself off his hip into a full sitting position; then started flexing the knots out of his shoulders. "You always hear accordions when something's in France."

"…Is that so?"

Either he didn't hear the sudden flat disinterest in Ivan's voice, or he just didn't care. "Go back, Ivan, this looks boring."

"But it is one of your films."

"And so far it's just a couple of women talking—in _France_." Alfred's upper lip curled around the name. "It's probably about love, or cancer, or—"

"Communists," Ivan supplied after a familiar phrase caught his interest.

"What now?"

"She called somebody a Red."

"Are you sure she's not talking about her hair?" Alfred gestured to the woman in uniform.

"She is talking about somebody who is a Red." He could even see the word "communist" on the projector screen, circled aggressively in ink.

"Don't be ridiculous," the movie interjected. "He was a Red, for about five seconds. Because of some woman he used to go out with."

Ivan noticed the way the eyes of the redheaded soldier bore into the other woman that was sitting down, as if she had just said something dangerously stupid. He'd seen that same look many times before: during world summits, meetings, on the faces of his own politicians. But what she said next…

"Nobody stops being a communist, Benjamin. It's a terminal disease."

Both of them blinked.

The air in the room seemed to be sipped through a straw. It didn't break; it didn't drop to the floor and shatter; the words simply sank into the atmosphere and absorbed their own conversation like a sponge, leaving them both speechless.

For Ivan it was also a brief recess from his body as he tried to figure out how to react, when getting insulted seemed to be beyond him. Though he tried to be find the anger necessary for such ignorance, and by concentrating, he didn't notice that Alfred snatched the remote from his hand until the television switched off, and a residue of light particles was left behind on the screen, fading bit by bit into the shadows.

Alfred made a disgruntled noise inside his throat. "Four A.M.: there'd better be a fucking rerun tomorrow."

Ivan felt the couch lift as Alfred got up and began collecting the various plates and bowls that had accumulated around his end of the couch during what he had called a "midnight snack," but turned into a six-course meal. With the finesse of a seasoned waiter, Alfred managed to balance everything in the crooks of his arms and carried them to the kitchen.

He curled his fingers into his palm; then he rose from his seat and wandered into the kitchen. Alfred kept his back to him, preoccupied with the dishes. That was new. He usually just dumped everything into the sink and forgot about them until he ran out of clean plates and couldn't eat out of his hands anymore.

Ivan didn't know what to think, so he didn't think about it at all. He walked past Alfred to the refrigerator, tugging the freezer door open and locked eyes with the Putinka he kept there.

"…I told you that movie was going to suck," Alfred punctured the silent space between them.

"Indeed you did. How insightful you are, Alfred."

"It's not insight." He picked up a bowl with melted ice cream sitting in a thick puddle at the bottom. After a second of considering it, he began searching for a spoon. "…Any idiot could see there wasn't going to be any explosions or alien invasions."

Alfred couldn't find a spoon, so he shrugged and sipped at the ice cream like rude dinner guest with a bowl of soup. The loud slurping sounds broke apart his sentence: "Politics are boring enough in real life—movies are supposed to be fun and entertain people."

At one point it must've been amusing to somebody. Humans were not that unpredictable: stabbing the enemy with comedy was a quick vacation from their fear. Back when he was terrifying and unknown to Alfred's country.

And he still was, for the most part. An enemy was a bit more familiar than what they were now.

Ivan was a bit surprised by Alfred's change in position when he extracted his bottle from the small icy space of the freezer and turned on his heel. He didn't hear him flip around or press his lower back to the counter, but now they were standing face to face, and Ivan stared blankly through Alfred's scrutiny of…he wasn't quite sure.

His eyes didn't seem to concentrate on just one part of Ivan, but rather sketching over his chest and shoulders, as if putting something together inside his head.

Ivan wondered if it was the vodka. Alfred didn't like it when he insisted on storing an extra bottle in his freezer. And it had erupted into an argument that ended with Ivan leaving the country with a black eye and Alfred waking up on the floor with bits of glass in his hair.

Then again if he were still angry about it, he would have something to say. An insult or a long strand of whining about the perfectly good space he was wasting with his "nasty booze" that could be devoted to something delicious like ice cream or the flat, frosted cardboard rectangles that Alfred enjoyed so much for breakfast.

Ivan couldn't imagine what kind of thoughts would glue that big mouth shut, but he decided to play with it.

"Are you trying to find the symptoms?" He asked with an amused smile.

Finally his gaze flickered and refocused. "What?"

"My disease." Ivan twisted the cap off his bottle. "It has to have symptoms, yes?"

Alfred's jaw hardened into an unpleasant line: the spitting image of Arthur without the distracting eyebrows. "You're not funny."

"I am not trying to be."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Nothing." The contents of the bottle sloshed as Ivan downed three mouthfuls with an ease that would've normally put a look on Alfred's face like he just saw somebody swallow a live frog. "I only wonder…what type of signs would diagnose a communist?"

"Doesn't matter. You're not communist anymore, you were _'cured'_ or whatever."

Ivan dropped his eyelids to half-mast, still smiling: "Was I?" He lilted as warmly as the alcohol on his tongue.

Silence poisoned the room again. Alfred pushed out his bottom lip and glared harder, "Fuck your mind games."

After that he expected Alfred to turn around—or storm out of the room completely like a child. But he stayed firm in his tracks, staring him down as if he expected that to daunt him. After all of these years he should've known better.

Though Ivan was the first one to break eye contact; not out of fear but an offhanded fascination with watching his thumb trace around the lip of the bottle. "This word, 'terminal'…it means fatal, yes?"

"What about it?"

Nothing, except what an interesting phrase the soldier used. A terminal disease was something that couldn't be treated or cured. It was an active hourglass clicking down the time to an unstoppable and, more likely than not, disgraceful death.

If communism was a fatal disease, it failed to kill him. His government cracked and collapsed like a dead tree in flames, but he rose from the ashes quite sufficiently, as he did countless times before during his long life.

"If politics is an illness, it is a short one," Ivan said in what was almost a sigh. Not a cancer or irreparable trauma, but a common cold that could be nursed away by chicken soup and sleep—riots, screaming, misbehaving _children_, and blood. "…None of them last."

"Not mine."

Ivan's eyebrows almost lifted into his hairline. "Your government has already changed, Alfred. Or do you not remember?"

"Of course I remember," Alfred shot back as he turned to put his empty bowl in the sink. "Even if I could forget, Arthur would never let me. But you don't go forgetting something as awesome as that."

"Defeating Arthur?"

"Freedom. And now we've got a really good thing going on, so there's no reason to change. Don't fix what isn't broken and all that," he emphasized his point with a spinning flourish of his wrist.

At that moment a nuclear warhead could've crashed through the wall and Alfred's creepy alien friend could've streaked past them farting cheeseburgers, and Ivan wouldn't have noticed. He was waiting for something, some crack or hint that Alfred was not serious, but his words hung in the air. So certain and pure, it was…

Ivan's reaction started as a low guttural tremor; then he burst out laughing, causing Alfred to swivel around again.

"The hell is wrong with you _now_?!"

"Nothing, Alfred, nothing," he assured him once he recovered, wiping at his eye with his free hand. "Just remember that it is the people that make the change. Not us. And that is all, the end."

He scrunched up his face. "I know that."

"Then you must also know that it is uncertain when or what will cause us to change?"

Perhaps that was what also made politics like an illness, Ivan thought. They couldn't control what ideologies permeated their borders as much as humans could control the pathogens that made them sick. But the countries had even less control, because nothing made them immune to the bad ideas of a bad leader. In their vast bodies of land and the bloodstreams of their culture and citizens, it was the viral politicians that made them sick.

Ivan took another long drag from his bottle, his eyes turned upwards so he couldn't see Alfred's expression until he stopped drinking.

"Maybe for you. But I already told you, America's staying the way it is. And _that's_ what's final."

"But for me, you say…" His voice almost became fond. "And what would you do if my government decided to become communist again?"

Alfred visibly tensed. Both his hands brushed the surface behind him like he needed a reminder that it was there. "…That's a dumb question."

"And that is not an answer."

"Because I don't want to answer it, it's stupid."

"Humor me."

"Go humor yourself."

Alfred's plunge into the nonsensical put a smile on Ivan's lips. "I see. Thinking hypothetically is hard for you, isn't it?"

"Or…" He rolled his tongue over the word. "Does the thought scare you, Alfred? Going back to the way things were, when I was your enemy?"

A pause, and then: "I don't want it," Alfred finally told the floor as if it cared about their previous relations.

Ivan was not given much chance to reply as he marched forward, closing the gap between them with casual footsteps that would've been more impressive if he were wearing boots instead of socks that padded softly on the linoleum. Until he stopped within an inch of colliding with Ivan's body and puffed out his chest so they were closer to the same height.

His voice came out in a tone more suitable to growling close to an ear, all blunt edges and confidence: "I don't want to have to kick your ass twice; I just don't have the goddamn time."

Ivan didn't smile back, but the corners of his lips curled upwards as he surveyed Alfred down the length of his noise. So close he could see the shades of clear blue in his eyes, and the glimmer of uncertainty that passed through them as Alfred tilted back an inch.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Now I am trying to see it in you." He continued to stare at Ivan in confusion. "The communism. It could be contagious."

The roll of Alfred's eyes was slow and exaggerated, like his sound of disgust. He broke away from Ivan's gravitational pull and started walking towards his bedroom. "Shut up."

"You could be infected with my disease as we speak, Alfred."

"I said shut up."

Ivan's eyes lit up. "Or what if it was sexually transmitted?"

Alfred spun around. "I don't have fucking communism, okay? Let it go."

He disappeared around the corner, and Ivan chuckled to himself. So it seemed they still couldn't talk politics, even in the remission of their war.


End file.
